Hello everybody, In aMember manual says that cron.php should run on a hourly basis. But my hosting only support daily setup. My question is: is it really necessary to setup this cron hourly ? Or daily is already sufficient. Thank you, Herbert.
Depends on what payment type you are using, subscription or one time payments, whether or not you are using affiliate, etc. I use PayPal and Authorize.net, one time payments, no affiliate. I run my cron on a daily basis.
Hello, I believe CCBill is the only payment processor that requires more than once a day. If you have recurring subscriptions then when using CCBill as payment processor, CCBill will rebill the subscription. On initial signup aMember will set the expiration date of subscription to next billing cycle. CCBill has what is known as a datalink connection that can be queried for expired/renewed subscriptions. This mechanism via aMember's cron.php is used by aMember to query for any subscriptions that have expired on renewed. I believe CCBill only reports subscriptions that have expired/renewed on that calendar day. It is thru cron.php and datalink connection to CCBill that aMember is able to properly update the payment record to deny access or move the expiration forward to the next billing cycle date. I believe the reason for doing it hourly or more than once a day is to have some reduncy in case a path to the network is down so that if the query to CCBill fails it can be tried again. Its not clear from documentation what happens if your website or network is down longer than 24 hours if when you come up whether or not CCBill reports expired or renewed subscriptions that had not be reported. As part of the query you pass the startdate and enddate of subscriptions you are interested in so hopefully CCBill will report them. If it does then it would seem once a day would be sufficient, if it doesn't then you would have to manually update payment records. aMember plugins register with aMember plugin architecture how often they need to be called. The CCBill payment processor registers for hourly. All other plugins register for daily, including the internal aMember stuff that does email stuff. aMember has code to make sure that plugins they require daily are only called once for that day. So if you set up cron to go hourly then only plugins they require hourly notification will be called at that frequency all others would only be called once in a 24 hour period. Jimmy
If your host allows no cron to be run more than once per day and you need once per hr for ccBill then simply set up 24 crons. One for 1am, next for 2am etc
If you have a REALLY strict hosting service who ruthlessly enforce the cron thing and you really want to get devious then make 23 copies of cron.php with different names and set up the crons, 1 each for each renamed copies of cron. Run Aron.php at 1am run Bron.php at 2am run Cron.php at 3am ....all the way to... run Xron.php at midnight.
I use Paypal, subscription (monthly) and will have affiliate. In this case, can a run cron daily ? Tks.